Predicted compliance in obedience situations as a function of implied instructional variables

Understanding behavior in the Milgram obedience experiment: The role of personality, situations, and their interactions.

“…The dramatic demonstration that people are much more prone to obey the orders of a legitimate authority than one might have expected remains an enduring insight, but one that is in need of some qualification: Milgram (1963Milgram ( , 1965c did indeed find drastic underestimations of full obedience (with 3% of the subjects, at the most, expected to obey), but others (e.g., Kaufmann & Kooman, 1967;Mixon, 1971) have obtained findings suggesting that greater accuracy in predicting the outcome of an obedience experiment is possible. Milgram also showed how difficult it is for people to translate their intentions into actions even when moral principles might be at stake, and that momentary situational pressures and norms (e.g., rules of deference to an authority) can exert a surprising degree of influence on people's behavior.…”

The Milgram Paradigm After 35 Years: Some Things We Now Know About Obedience to Authority1

“…The percentage of subjects predicted to be fully obedient ranged from an average of 33.52% (naive females' estimates) to 44.3% (naive males' estimates). Kaufmann and Kooman ( 1967) gave subjects descriptions based on Milgram's ( 1 963) procedures and found 27% of them predicting that the "teacher" would continue to the end of the 450-V shock scale. A similar finding was obtained in a more recent study by Guimond et al (1994) involving a group of Canadian officer candidates.…”